"The whole premise smacks of retaliation," Shaffer, who won a Bronze Star medal while leading a black-ops team fighting the Taliban, told the network news station. "Someone buying 10,000 books to suppress a story in this digital age is ludicrous."

The Pentagon has already redacted large portions of Shaffer’s 299-page book, which is being published by St. Martin’s Press.

Pentagon officials said last month that Shaffer and his publisher didn’t get the okay to publish all the topics the soldier covers in "Dark Heart" - and took matters into their own hands last week.

The New York Times reveals a few open secrets
By Paul Woodward | WarInContext.org

At the New York Times, Scott Shane divulges a national security secret: the National Security Agency (shown in the Google Earth image above) is known by the nickname the Fort. I guess you’d call that the definition of hiding in plain sight since the NSA is located in Fort Meade.

Apparently anyone in the locality could tell you the NSA headquarters is known as the Fort and Shane would not know that that’s supposed to be a secret had he not obtained a copy of a banned book available on eBay.

[T]hat nickname is one of hundreds of supposed secrets Pentagon reviewers blacked out in the new, censored edition of an intelligence officer’s Afghan war memoir. The Defense Department is buying and destroying the entire uncensored first printing of “Operation Dark Heart,” by Anthony Shaffer, a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve and former Defense Intelligence Agency officer, in the name of protecting national security.

Another supposed secret removed from the second printing: the location of the Central Intelligence Agency’s training facility — Camp Peary, Va., a fact discoverable from Wikipedia. And the name and abbreviation of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, routinely mentioned in news articles. And the fact that Sigint means “signals intelligence.”

Not only did the Pentagon black out Colonel Shaffer’s cover name in Afghanistan, Chris Stryker, it deleted the source of his pseudonym: the name of John Wayne’s character in the 1949 movie “The Sands of Iwo Jima.”

The redactions offer a rare glimpse behind the bureaucratic veil that cloaks information the government considers too important for public airing.

The New York Times is generous enough to provide a kind of Wikileaks teaser — a single page of the redacted and unredacted book.

Was it out of deference to St Martin’s Press or the Pentagon that the Times refrained from divulging more of the redactions?

And was the NSA so “liberal” in its use of redaction because they want to keep secret the criteria they use for defining secrecy, or because when it comes to secrecy, government officials in the post 9/11 era know that no one ever gets fired for over-classification?

The few copies of the book that managed to evade the Pentagon’s dragnet are now being exchanged for up to $2,000 on the internet Photo: AP

"The author has said he has fallen victim to an increased sensitivity about inside information following the release by the Wikileaks website of thousands of military documents detailing the conduct of the war, and the resignation of Gen Stanley McChrystal as US commander in Afghanistan because of disparaging comments about the Barack Obama administration made by his aides to a magazine.

Lt Col Shaffer also said that the "Pentagon wanted to shut this off until after the election", because it was "more bad news".
Major congressional elections are being held on Nov 2.

In a statement, the Pentagon said it "decided to purchase copies of the first printing because they contained information which could cause damage to national security". The books were destroyed on Sep 20."Source

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